Red Copper Camels Part 3 - How big are they again..?

 The Red Copper 3D printed camels were printed out for me by "In the Navy" Harry at "100%" in the "15mm" scale format they are supplied in - but they do look a tad on the large side, and he has also done some at 90% for me too which are still on the painting table. 

I've therefore taken a few shots of them stood next to other 15mm camels I own so you can see whether they look "too big" or not. 

In all of these shots there is a caveat that the Red Copper ones are based on MDF + magnabase + a steel  base, which I did to give them extra heft and weight. 

The other camels will be on either MDF + magnabase, or sometimes even cardboard + magnabase, so will be a smidge lower due to having thinner bases. 

Forged in Battle Camelphracts + Red Copper Camelry @ 100% of the 15mm print size

Red Copper and the (venerable) Essex Successor baggage guarding camelry.

This is quite a difference - in height, but also stylistically too.

Red Copper and the newish Museum Baggage Guard camels from their Z range. 

Height wise the difference is not too much, but the width and overall style of the figures is very different - but viewed from a tabletop commander's standpoint, perhaps not so obvious really.

 

15mm Avar / Sarmatian cavalry being sold on eBay

I'm selling 41 nicely painted and presented Khurasan Miniatures 15mm Avar cavalry armed with a mix of bows and lances, with 4 more Light Horse archers (which I think are Minifigs?) too. 

They are listed on eBay with Global Shipping enabled too so you can buy them from anywhere in the world and eBay will ship them to you. 

They are all painted, and based up on DBx-standard 40x30mm bases with magnabase on all of them for safe storage in any metal tin or toolbox. 

These 41 figures would allow you to make up the DBA army III/13a Avars 553-557AD & 642-826AD, or  II/26 Sciracae, Iazyges & Later Rhoxolani Sarmatian 310-375BC , or form the core of a very handy ADLG or DBM army / allied contingent -  I think you could also use them as Goths, Huns or any sort of Steppe Nomad types and no-one would blink an eye.

They are based up with a mix of 2, 1 or zero "barded" horses on each base allowing you to easily differentiate between different grades of cavalry in your army list even without even needing to set off down the "different coloured flowered grass tufts" route. 

Looking more closely I think a couple of spears have broken off in the many years since I bought and painted these - which isn't too bad out of 37 lancers who've seen reasonable tabletop usage, and I'm sure you can reasily replace them of just hide the pair of guilty geezers in this mass of hard-charging lancers anyway.

These are being sold to make space in my Bisley cabinets as part of my grudging "one-in-one-out" resolution to try and keep a lid on the number of figures that I actually own. 

EBay Link is https://ebay.us/m/tZ1aG6

15mm Arab Light Horsemen

 My 15mm Arab armies have been chugging along for many years, making do with some Lancashire Games Light Horse Javelinmen from their Sudan / Mahdist range. 

They have done sterling service but are not the best figures out there, and also suffer from rather spindly spears and swords, so I have finally decided to replace them with some Forged in Battle Arab cavalry. 

These are pretty straightforward figures, typical FiB which take contrast paints very well - especially on the horses - and have robust metal spears (aka arguably a bit too thick but they are very unlikely to break in action)

The pack of 12 (old sizes pre Dec 2025!) had a mix of 6 short spears, 3 commanders and 5 long spear riders plus 12 horses. These are the short spear guys.

And these are the "lancers" with a commander figure too.

I've done most of them with a simple paint job, using contrast paints on the horses, ArmyPainter Leather Speedpaint on the reins (as I find it both works and sort of self-blacklines too).

The white is a white base coat, a layer of Army Painter Holy White, and then normal white paint that leaves bits ofthe Holy White (aka grey wash) visible in places underneath that are folds in the cloth. 

All in all an upgrade on my old horsemen, and a simple but effective set of figures for tabletop use.

  

Numidian "Imitation Legionaries"

I've been accidentally collecting a Numidian army for many years now, with the most recent addition being some 3D printed cavalry who entered the collection earlier this year. 

With a possible opportunity to use the army in a competition at Warfare 2025, I recently decided that I really did need to add some "imitation legionaries" to the mix to make the army a little more viable - and with Forged in Battle being easy to buy in quantity, and compatible with the rest of my FiB infantry in the army it was their Numidian heavy infantry who got bought. 

These troops were recruited and fielded in the later Punic Wars period, when the Numidians began to adopt Roman military formations and equipment, such as a pilum and shield, and even trained under Roman instructors - or sons of Gladiators if you believe the 2nd installment of Ridley Scott's opus! 

Either way, troops who were trained to fight in a more resilient close-combat style that imitated Roman tactics and capabilities sounded like a good complement to the Numidians' traditional light cavalry and skirmishing types, and here they all are: 

Buying two packs of infantry and basing many of them 7 to a base allowed me to eke out 7 units from the nominally 2x24 FiB blisters, due to the presence of a couple of extra figures. 

As they are not-quite Romans, I wanted to paint them in a non-Roman (ie "not red") palette, so I went with a white undercoat, with Yanden Yellow GW Contrast as the main colour for their tunics. 

The straps were left white, and then done with Army Painter Leather Speedpaint, which I find gives an interesting colour texture, but more importantly pretty much self-blacklines (or "brown-lines"?) on these deeply sculpted FiB figures. 

  

The 2 blisters had a set each of trumpeter, officer and standard bearer, which you can see at the front of this block of all 7 units. 

For shields I wanted to be a bit Roman, but still retain a tribal feel that would match my existing Numidian skirmisher types, all of whom have brown hide-like shields. The compromise I settled on was to paint the shields in a dusty brown (a bit of a mix of various browns) and then add either "tribal" patterns or a knock-off "Roman-style" laurel wreath in a random selection, suggesting that whilst these were still tribal warriors, some of them had made at least a passing effort to impersonate the "Romans " their commanders aspired them to become.

 

The laurel wreath is pretty effective IMO, and even better, remarkably easy to do as its a series of green blobs and half-moons, each half-moon then having a second layer in a lighter shade of green added on top for contrast. 

The Yanden Yellow works really well on these figures too, almost uniform but also very "in the desert" 

 

Here's an officer unit close up - showing how I failed to clean off the static grass before photographing them! 

There are more Numidian figures on this blog / website you can see here:

• Numidan Light Horse in 15mm 
• 28mm Infantry 
• 28mm cavalry
• 15mm Numidian Infantry - Traditional Skirmishers
• More 15mm Infantry
• Numidians in the Photo Gallery

Top Tier Nikephorians

 In what may possibly be the final Byzantine Cavalry installment, here are the "Elite" Nikephorian (and perhaps a little later too) mixed bow/lance cavalry all from Forged in Battle.

As with the previous set, these are a mix of archer figures from one pack, and lance armed guys from another, both in the "Thematic" range.

Being half-armoured marks them out on the tabletop as being either "Elite", or "Heavy cavalry" - or indeed perhaps both. 

The colours are the same as for the previous set, although on this picture you can also see some of the bow cases, which are - for no scientific or historical reason - GWs Contrast Akhelion Green, which pools nicely to give a real depth of colour to help pick out the small details of bowcases on these figures. 

I had 8 remaining LBMS kite shield transfers when I did this set, which looked idea - but having cut them all out and stuck them on I suddenly noticed that the trumpeter with the Commander had a hidden shield slung on his back - which meant that this set of 8 was in fact a set of 9 ! 

Mustering all my bravery, a new paint brush, and secure in the knowledge that a shield on the back of a cavalryman would only ever really be seen by me (and from a distance of a couple of feet at best), I attempted to create a "trompe l'oeil" impression of the LBMS design for the vacant shield.

This close up it's clearly not the same, but in all honesty I'm pretty dammed prooud of even being able to get this close - and at tabletop distances with my eyesight its as close to perfect as you can hope for!

Almughavars!

 As the UK has been recently basking in weather more suited to the beaches of Barcelona, it seems a good time to share some "test painted" Catalan Almughavars from the Lurkio range, now being produced by Gripping Beast.

I'd always had a vague idea of getting myself a Catalan army at some point, mainly as it's a fairly unique army with the unique troop type of Almughavar. 

However the large number of Almughavars needed (of course...) don't really morph into anything else, so it had stayed on the back burner for ages - until a Lurkio "almost closing down sale" a while back tempted me  to grab a bargain with 3 sets of 24 Almughavars at a discount price giving me all I could ever need and more. 

And these are the jolly little chaps - rather "hobbity" if I may say, but not without their own charm and looking somewhat similar in style to some of the Baueda ranges too (so maybe the same sculptor?).

A I wasn't entirely taken with the sculpts, rather than paint all 72 in one go I decided to just do 24 of the more static-posed ones, and to experiment with a mostly contrast paints style to see if I could bang them out quickly and be done with them.  

As most of my other Medievals are traditionally painted with black undercoat, I wasn't sure if doing these in Contrasts would work well together with some of my existing Knights and other morphed troops who make up the rest of the Catalan army.

Having tidied them up, matt varnished them and added basing they look OK - this lot are a bit hard to judge in some ways as these are all the static poses, so there isn't much dynamism.

  

From the back you can see the quite nice way the Hardened Leather Speedpaint has worked for the belts to pick them out and do a bit of almost blacklining for me. 

I ended up overpainting some of the contrasts with "highlights" of normal paints too in the end to try and beef up the otherwise rather washed out colours. 

There are people out there who swear blind that Almughavars shouldn't have shields, but there are just too many of these guys with shields to leave the shielded ones out. 

Painting them was a bit of a dilemma too, as the shields are too tiny for me to even attempt any sort of heraldic pattern, so I just went for some simple "Catalan" stripes in the end. 

I'm pleased with how they have come out in the end, as I didn't have high hopes for these guys after seeing the castings - buyers remorse for not just spending the extra dosh to buy the far better Eureka ones I think - but they are decent enough given the price point they were at in the "closing down" sale. 

At full price from Gripping Beast these guys are now about 68p a figure, with the Eureka ones not much more at 75p each, making it a bit of a no brainer to go Eureka IMO

Either way, at 67p or 75p, I doubt I'd have ever bought an army's worth of Almughavars, so these hobbity chaps are as good as it's ever going to get for an army I may only use a handful of times!

The Khurasanians go to Spain !

 In these 6 all new, all singing and flamenco-dancing battle reports you can thrill, gasp, gag and feel mildy queasy all at the same time as you read the epic tale of how a 15mm Khurasanian army fared as it took to the stage at an international ADLG event held in sunny Spain back in April of this year.

As usual there are plenty of nonsensical historical "facts" (ahem) about the armies in play, a smattering of vaguely related videos, and loads of pictures of 15mm toy soldiers verbally harassing both me, and one another.

This time however the Khursanian army is commanded by none other than Frank Zappa alter-ego Sheikh Yabouti, leading to some rather hippie-esque post match analysis, including almost enough 1970's references to make up for the near-total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness of his own role in his many downfalls. 

Nasty Medieval Hannibal also has his say as a counterpoint to the Sheikh's nonsense - and as usual he lands far more punches than he pulls. 

In a brand new, international-reader-friendly initiative I have (OK, AI has..) managed to translate all 6 of the reports into the languages of my opponents (3 into Spanish, 1 into German, 1 into Portuguese and 1 into....Australian!) 

So, pop a shrimp on the barbie, pull up a chair, slice yourself a chorizo, break open the Hob-nobs and pop a tinned sardine on top as you prepare to read through all 6 (or 7, if you also read the Australian one) Madaxeman battle reports! 

• Game 1 Khurasanian vs Ghaznavid    (also in Spanish)
• Game 2 Khurasanian vs Ottoman Empire     (also in German)
• Game 3 Khurasanian vs Mongol Empire    (also in Portuguese)
• Game 4 Khurasanian vs Wars of the Roses   (also in Spanish)
• Game 5 Khurasanian vs Mongol Empire   (also in Spanish)
• Game 6 Khurasanian vs French Ordonnance  (and also in Australian)

(Over the next few days and weeks I will also be publishing some Spanish Military Tourism videos, using photos taken during our trip to Madrid and the surrounding towns, so look out for that as well)